About

What is Cerbos

Authorization management platform

Enterprise authorization

Cerbos is an enterprise authorization solution built to secure access across complex, distributed environments, SaaS products, AI systems, and regulated industries.

Externalized

The solution externalizes authorization logic from application code, making access control consistent and centrally managed across all services, saving months of dev time while ensuring compliance and security.

Running at scale

Our software runs inside thousands of companies and processes over 1.2 billion authorization checks every month. Some of it is open source, some is commercial. All of it is designed to work together.

What we stand for

Our mission is to make authorization easy.

Authorization belongs as its own layer of the stack, not scattered through application code.

We've held that position since we started, and it shapes everything we build.

Policies should be human-readable.

That's why we chose YAML and CEL over Rego. A non-technical team member should be able to read a policy and understand what it does.

We're committed to open standards.

Cerbos is a key member of OpenID AuthZEN, and our PDP is AuthZEN-compliant. The specification was ratified in January 2026, and it's where the industry is going.

The origin of our name

Our company name actually comes as a derivative of Cerberus. When we started Cerbos, we were thinking about different ways of protecting things and how that relates to authorization. We got to talking about dogs, and then talked about Cerberus being the ultimate protective dog. After talking it through a bit more, Cerberus became Cerbos and our logo became Cerbie, the mascot of Cerbos!

The Cerbos team

We're a group of globally distributed people working on the complex authorization challenges our users bring us. Cerbos was founded in 2021 by Emre Baran, Alex Olivier, and Charith Ellawala. We're headquartered in London and fully remote.